If I smash your car, is that violence or not? What if I take care to smash your car only so much that it will still be able carry you to work and back?
They definitely have a very hyper-capitalist definition of violence. It's sort of pathetic how much people somehow care about the property of the ruling classes that they will never own.
I never said anything like that so why are you implying that I am? Nice strawman bro, I'm not crying over things people say to me on the internet. Anyone who sees a mean comment on the internet that doesn't actually threaten or incite violence as violence is just as pathetic as people who think art they don't like on a wall is violence. Can you please argue against points I actually made, thank you.
I am not at all a hyper capitalist. I would even consider myself anti-capitalist.
But imposing your own preferred art on public commons is a (minor) form of violence, in any economic system. Especially when you do so with paints of questionable chemical composition, or with images/text that is likely to offend.
I would also say that doing the same thing even on your own property can be reprehensible, as long as it is visible to the public. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you should be able to make it look however you want on the outside, especially not in ways that are actively unpleasant to those of us that need to walk by it every day: we the public should have a say in how your private property looks. A most anti-capitalist position.
Think about it this way, if we all owned all public structures, then we all have equal rights to paint it just as much as you have the right to paint your own house. The graffiti artist has the right to paint it, you have the right to hate it. You have the right to paint something they hate, or paint over their stuff. Nobody should be being prosecuted by a higher power for a minor disagreement about artistic taste. Unless someone is full on painting swastika-ridden explicitly racist murals or sth of that nature, it's not violent. The only reason the ruling class wants you to think it's violent is because property is important to them as a source of power, and therefore must be god above all under this system.
No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).
I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?
Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.
And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?
While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).
Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.
And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.
I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.
not op but violence is traditionally defined as physical force to cause harm. but now there's financial violence and social media violence and here the message in the graffiti causes harm. eg die techy scum. it's not physically violent, but some think it's helpful to frame it as a non-physical violent act because of the expression of dislike for a particular community. it doesn't cause any grave harm, but everyone who walks by and sees it is affected by it.
Violence has always extended beyond pure physical force. Calling someone a slur to their face, or spitting in their food, or defacing their clothes or home (especially with hateful symbols) would be recognized as forms of violence at many times in history way before modern times. Holding someone at knife or gun point is also very clearly a violent act.